This invention relates to electrostatic precipitators.
In conventional precipitators, a half-wave or full-wave transformer provides voltage to the discharge electrodes. This provides both corona charging fields and particle collecting fields. These fields are not independent and are limited to the spark breakdown voltage seen by the precipitators. For high resistivity dust collection, breakdown in the dust layer at the collecting electrodes can happen at very low voltage levels and seriously impede particle charging and collection.
The invention also relates particularly to electrostatic precipitators in which a pulse voltage is applied to the corona discharge electrodes superimposed on top of the DC base voltage.
The invention also relates to multistage precipitators in which a preceding stage may be pulsed to produce the ionization to charge the particles and a succeeding stage may be used to collect the charged particles.